Yahoo Search Marketing Pay Per Click Advertising Forum

The click-through rate on Yahoo's search ads increased 5 percent in the week ending Feb. 11 and 9 percent in the week ending Feb. 18, both compared with the week ending Feb. 4, comScore said Monday. The new ranking system went live in the U.S. on Feb. 5.

Yahoo's new system assigns rank to pay-per-click search ads by taking into consideration the advertisers' bid amounts plus the ads' relevance to the search query. Previously, Yahoo ranked ads solely based on the amount bid.

The new ranking system is part of Yahoo's new search advertising platform, called Panama, which also has a campaign management tool for advertisers that was launched previously.

bwnbwn, I hope you weren't trying to hard - for three months - since the new algorithm just went into effect two weeks ago.

Personally, I'm seeing nothing but positive from the switch. Some keywords need attention, but for the most part the traffic that we are getting now is better, ads are showing up more often and in higher positions (because we only advertise on relevant terms), and cost/conversion is improved.

Eventually, I expect competition will get more savvy and we'll have to increase our bids to match that, but I suppose that's good news for Yahoo and as long as ROI stays inline I won't mind either given the other improvement to quality traffic, etc.

exposure Actually we were invited to an early beta testing and moved over several months ago I can look back but is has been I know 2-3 months. The reason I know is our expenses monthly shot up and I got chewed out by the owner...

I have been working on this since so it may have gone nation wide but we have been using it several months now.

bwnbwn, you may have had beta access to the Panama interface, but the algorithmic update associated with Panama didn't go into effect until starting Feb 5th. Costs don't go up due to interface changes.

There are other aspects of Pananma (if changed) could account for differences besides the Feb 5th algorithmic update.

If people are just sitting on the transitioned accounts without using all the new features Panama has to offer, then they are doing their clients an injustice. The real test is NOT -- how is it doing before and after with no changes!

The real test IS -- using all the new features how much better can I make it perform than the old system!

With the new ranking methods at Yahoo, we are also now more open to spending more. In fact, we've added thousands of new keywords in the past month and we're showing cost per conversion getting better all the time on old keywords too.

exposute, you said "you may have had beta access to the Panama interface, but the algorithmic update associated with Panama didn't go into effect until starting Feb 5th. Costs don't go up due to interface changes"

Please tell me how you know this as what your stating is fact or you think...

Expoure what I thought this was only this part of the new platform "both bid amount and ad quality will now determine an adís rank in search results"

We had been in the new platform for several months but this feature was actually part of it just officially launched. There was more to the Panama than this I hope you know, this was a small part of the whole change.

If you haven't already seen there is a big expense jump due to you are automacilly put into the advanced search and content search as well when updated.

Google or yahoo have never perforemed well for us in content search just a big expense.

This was one of the cost spikes I experienced and had to opt out of them again. I have discovered other reasons for the spike and made adjustments and now have the account doing very well.

The new platform is considered Panama you are refering to just one aspect of the new platform

Right, I'm aware of this. I disagree that Panama could have affected spending prior to the algo update since just using a different tool to look at your account doesn't by itself change spending levels... unless there was a bug in your account or the process of upgrading turned on/up some features, as you allude to, that you didn't use previously.

I think that part of what we disagree on here is regarding different recent upgrades all being considered together, which they shouldn't be. And we can agree that Yahoo didn't really define the various steps that were happening very well. They allowed the several changes to be jointly called "Panama" - though they didn't want it to be called that, apparently, they also didn't offer any alternative description or named stages, etc. No need to argue about it here. How we choose to define the different account changes wasn't the point of this thread, so...

I for one am very pleased, so far, but I hope this is just the first in a series of improvements. It was getting very difficult at the end there waiting a whole year after the new platform and algo were finally announced. Several times I wanted to just stop advertising with Yahoo altogether.

Now that it's here - it's a great improvement.

And there are some things that I hope will be forthcoming soon:

What Yahoo has missed the boat on is providing large-scale users a method for editing. There is no AdWords Editor style software. This is practically a requirement for managing a significant number of keywords effectively.

There is no ability to generate custom reports yet. (Especially useful would be a single exportable .csv that included click and conversion data AND bid on the same sheet. Since we are forced to do bulk editing via Excel, at least give us one sheet to view all that data together!)

And better customer service would be nice too. When sending $10s of thousands of dollars in their direction each month it'd be nice to get a return phone call. This is improving too, though, now.